"Poll Suggestion - Dice Towers and Dice Trays" Topic

In the last couple of weeks I have bought a set of hexagonal dice trays and a dice tower. This has only taken 50+ years of wargaming for that to happen.

So my poll suggestion – do you use a Dice tower, dice tray, both or neither?

Never used either, see no need.

Tray.

We use dice trays of various sizes. The only dice tower we've used was one shaped like a Medieval tower which we used as a terrain piece rather than a dice tower.

Jim

Tried dice towers — cool looking and painted dragons — for Dragon Dice. But after the first few rolls the players didn't use them.

Use small dice trays regularly for club and convention games. They do keep down the number of times enthusiastic players bounce dice all over the table, knocking over figures and losing dice onto the floor.

Use a large hexagonal dice tray at home when we play Koplow's Train dice game. It's pretty and allows a good roll for a half dozen of dice on a small tray table without any rolling onto the floor.

I went with a third option.

I built a dice cart that has a rolling area on the top shelf (2x2 with edge), two lower shelves (for rules and other gaming paraphernalia), and wheels (to roll to different locations around the table. The hight is about an inch lower than the bottom of gaming table (for off game storage).

This really keeps clutter of the gaming surface.

Neither regularly but have tried both

Trays quite often (though a fairly recent innovation for me) ; dice towers rarely, though I gave two.

A dice tray gets used a lot. Once in a while a dice tower comes out. Very functional and hardly ever any ambiguous dice rolls. On the other hand, rolling dice on the actual terrained table has very frequent misrolls, "cracked" results, and sometimes knocking over or moving stands of miniatures

An older warmer introduced me to dice towers a few years back.

It took a while but gradually, all the younger players got them.

We have been using dice trays of different sorts consciously or unconsciously for decades ourselves.

Or simply stipulate the dice must be thrown on the table as c lose to the combatants/relevant minis as possible. For RPGs less a problem.
Dice on floors don't count.

Dice trays, Yes. Dice Towers, NO. Just an extra thing to carry to a game and I travel as light as possible.

Have and have used both. I'd say as a general rule, the trays work best just to one side of--that is OFF--a small table. (I do a lot of card table battles.) The towers work nicely on larger tables disguised as terrain, but there has to be something at the base to corral the dice. A "Knoll's mitre"--chimney and open fireplace which is all that's left of a burnt-up house--works for many periods, with the ruins of the foundation walls keeping the dice from going AWOL.

Home made dice tower, 3 baffles then tossed into a tray. No roll is legitimate unless it's from there and each army has their own dice

I have used both and do not have a preference. I totally get the dice tower concept at the conventions, impossible to cheap a die roll with a tower.

I use a wooden bowl my son turned for me out of some exotic wood for my sports board games. But for my wargaming buddy and I we just roll on the table and if the die doesn't lay flat we reroll. We are pretty easy going.

Both. I made one of my dice towers from the thin plywood of a box of Clementines (small oranges). The other two were made from small cardboard boxes, with the baffles held in place with hot glue. They work as well as any store-bought items.

Tray. I've had too many stands/ships whacked by over enthusiastic tossing as well as innumerable crawling around on hands and knees hunting that last missing die.

My wife gave me the coolest dice tray ever. It's a stiff-sided, zippered, nylon bag in the form of the Millenium Falcon, originally intended as storage for Lego Star Wars figures.

Here's a picture of one from eBay:

link

It's gotten a lot of use at away games -- conventions and friends' homes -- both to carry dice to the game and for rolling dice during the game. Somehow, I never seem to need it at home games.

I use a dice tray all of the time over the last couple of years.

Dice Towers and Trays. My Dice Towers ensure completely random rolls -- painfully random rolls, every time.

I play a bucket-o-dice wargame, sometimes rolling 50d6 at one go. I have three of them, each of the same design (wide mouthed top, allowing me to dump 50+ dice at once), one Padauk, and two Hickory. The Towers and their Trays are immensely helpful in both rolling and containing such a bounty of dice. I use them as much as I can. Cheers!

Tray, infrequently.

Neither.

I've tried both and currently am trying to use a tray (I do tend to be klutzy with die rolls). I made a dice tower once but stopped using it Once I determined the dice often slid along the baffles rather than bouncing down and this made the results predictable with which side was up when one dropped a die.

Both. I have designed my own dice towers printed on cardstock, cut, folded, and glued. Use them all the time, but they won't handle large amounts of dice. Get over 10, and the dice start to bounce out of the bottom tray or wind up on top of each other.

I like trays for larger amounts, but trays have a big table space footprint.

So I mix it up, also with just rolling on a bare space.

Dice Towers seem a bit pointless, but I have a few dice trays. Stops players (and me) scattering dice all over the tabletop or onto the floor.

gamertom, take a look at this slo-mo video of dice dropping into a Bloodwood Dice Tower: individual rolls, handful at once.

The Janka Hardness of the wood makes somewhat of a difference: the harder the wood, the higher pitched the clatter of the dice is, as they bounce off of the baffles inside; my suspicion is that the harder the wood, the more reactive the dice are as they bounce off of it. We only filmed dice rolls through the Bloodwood Tower, as it required a Plexi-Glass face for filming.

The same carpenter made a 4-foot tall Dice Tower with a Plexi-Glass front, for use with foam d6's for a game of change project he never followed through with. It was fun to roll large foam d6's through it, watching them bounce: customers would pay for a roll with six large foamie d6's, and if they scored certain patterns in their roll, they might win a prize, but they would always win a set of polyhedral dice; with the correct pattern on their roll, they could have won a $140 USD rare wood Dice Tower, metal polyhedral dice, and more.

We rolled those foamies 140 times, recording the results, because he did not believe the mathematical results I found for winning die rolls: the chances of winning the grand prize $140 USD Dice Tower was something like 1 in 300,000. Apparently, he never ran with it. It was fun rolling the foamies to spot-check the odds, though. The odds dictated that he would make a lot of money off of the die rolls: the polyhedral dice sets cost 1/3 the fee customers paid to roll the 6d6 foamies, so no matter what, he would have made money on it. Cheers!

I do occasionally use a dice tray, but not often. It is a practical solution to the problem of not enough space on the table when there is just too much going on and not much real-estate for rolling a handful of dice. Practical and doesn't slow down the game much, if at all.

I've 3D printed some dice towers. They are complete a novelty item and not a practical tool for keeping a game moving along at a reasonable clip.

1. They slow down the game rolling a single die through it.

2. They slow down the game even more rolling several dice through it.

3. They don't really look good on a tabletop with nice terrain; they just don't fit in aesthetically.

4. Rolling the dice by hand on the table produces an equally random roll for all practical purposes unless you have a roller-cheater in your midst in which the problem is the player and not the randomness of the roll.

I use the tower that comes with 'Wingspan' to play Wingspan, because it works and fits the theme.

Otherwise, tray or table.

I have trays in various sizes and shapes and also a couple of towers; the problem is always having one accessible to an eager player at the right moment, typically I see folks too impatient to just wind up and toss. This does frequently lead to the usual scramble on the floor and wrecked terrain/units, alas. It's hard to enforce dice-rolling rules in a friendly game without coming off as a "Dice Nazi". (Is this a term of art? It should be!)

I saw the usefulness of dice towers at conventions, when RPG game masters in particular had very little table space to operate from and needed to also keep their dice rolls from scattering out of reach.